AMD vs. Intel 2020: Who Makes the Best CPUs?

https://www.tomshardware.com/features/amd-vs-intel-cpus

by ItsTotallyOn • 6 years ago

87 106 6 years ago

For me the single biggest factor is still single threaded performance. There are still many apps that are not multithreaded so all those extra cores are useless. Single thread performance will benefit any application. Intel still holds the lead in this category.

djd20• 6 years ago

Marginally, and not really when perf/$ is taken into account...

hddherman• 6 years ago

I don't like this argument for three reasons:

1. The single thread performance gap is very small (5-10% depending on application) or even non-existent in some cases.

2. Your computer runs more than one process at any given moment. The more cores, the more processes you can run without an impact on performance

3. That single core performance comes at the cost of efficiency and general power usage. Intel has had to clock their 14nm process very high to achieve that small lead in single thread performance.

Theodores2• 6 years ago

The key words in the parent post are 'for me'.

Imagine you have a single core compilation process that takes two minutes that you must run 50 times a day. This can happen. Ten percent brings 12 seconds per compile or ten minutes a day. This might not sound great but it means you can get an extra five compiles done. You can also get increased likelihood that you can remember what you were working on. Therefore the marginal gain in single thread performance is well worth having in this use case. The expense of genuine Intel becomes worth it even if you don't have so many cores.

daxfohl2• 6 years ago

It also assumes that this important single threaded process's dev team isn't actively working on parallelizing it. And that the primary purpose of the computer will be running this process until its end of life. Both pretty bad assumptions given the minimal benefit and high cost.

GhostVII• 6 years ago

Multi core performance is still useful if you are running many single-threaded applications at once.

vbezhenar• 6 years ago

If you are running many single-threaded applications at once AND if you care about their performance. For example my Windows might run some background processes from time to time, but I don't care about their execution time, all I care is about my foreground application.

s9w• 6 years ago

Barely, if at all. Not all benchmarks have been done with all exploit mitigations we have today. Also AMD is cheaper per performance.

dannyw• 6 years ago

Intel holds a minuscule lead here, not enough to be worth thinking about; especially against the Zen 2 architecture (Ryzen 3000 series chips).

Wanting an Intel over a Zen 1 for single threaded performance? Completely understandable.

philjohn• 6 years ago

IPC on Zen 2 is arguably slightly ahead of Intel, but they don't overclock or boost to 5Ghz.

grecy• 6 years ago

There are still many apps that are not multithreaded

Can you give some examples of CPU intensive apps that are not multi threaded in 2020?

ggcdn3• 6 years ago

I’m a structural engineer, running nonlinear analyses of buildings. These take about 3-5 days to run on an i9-9900k. The program runs each earthquake simulation on a single core.

jcelerier3• 6 years ago

An audio processing chain is necessarily single-threaded. e.g. if you want to simulate a guitar rack you have to first simulate the distortion pedal before the amp, the amp before the cab, the cab before the delay / reverb / whatever 200 other effects you're chaining. And you have to do all that in tight deadlines, e.g. <= 2 milliseconds.

sedatk• 6 years ago

Docker is a thing now, though.

daxfohl2• 6 years ago

You could still say AMD has an advantage. Given the cost difference, and the fact that Intel usually changes socket types each release, you could purchase a new AMD SKU every year and always have the latest. For the same price you'd probably have to be working with three or four year old Intel technology at some point. By that time the newer AMD SKU would be putting the old Intel processor to shame.

Of course if price is no object then the above doesn't apply.

bob1029• 6 years ago

I initially felt similar regrets after purchasing my 2950X. Obviously, the advantage with this CPU is being able to go wide on all cores, not necessarily maxing out any particular one. And it does work in a lot of cases. I regularly see 100% CPU when running rebuilds of large .NET Core applications. But, I also recognize that on a single-thread basis, I don't really have any advantage over anyone else (potentially even a small deficit).

But, this is a narrow-minded perspective to have. The future cannot possibly be that we magically invent an x86 core that can clock to 8GHz w/ practical power & cooling. One has to push forward in some incremental way. The answer is adding more parallel execution units. Sure, lots of software and techniques used today are not feasible to directly port over, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way.

As a software developer, I feel it is my duty to help push the state of the art forward wherever possible. I have already begun working on projects that are designed around the concept of extremely high core counts becoming the norm. Having 32 logical threads sitting in your local workstation makes it possible to practically experiment with the lower bounds of what would be required in a larger production deployment.

There are types of software that we can consider building today that would have sounded absolutely insane just a few years ago. Cloud gaming is now a thing falling within practical reach. How many more x86 cores per instance would we need before we could start thinking about rendering 100% of client views server-side (i.e. eliminate most HTML/CSS/JS) or deprecating the usefulness of discrete GPUs altogether? Pulling everything into a single memory domain could do wonders for breaking down the ages-old GPU/CPU functionality silos. One way to do it all with one instruction set and a single cache-coherent memory architecture...

rasz2• 6 years ago

Stop using Python for time critical applications ;-)

codecamper• 6 years ago

Given that amd has the lead in power consumption per performance, is it now the cpu of choice in the datacenter?

ItsTotallyOn2• 6 years ago

It certainly is in terms of power, performance, and cost, but Intel's reputation for rock-solid reliability and a decade of optimization for its architectures, not to mention the established software/support ecosystem, means AMD has a very long haul ahead of it.

cecja• 6 years ago

Sorry, but especially on servers amd has a better track record with reliability. You are right with missing optimizations on some software stacks but that’s not a long haul it’s just that nobody saw the need to do it until now. Don’t forget all the loss of performance from spectre mitigation a lot of datacenters lost up too 25% performance overnight. Everyone is going amd. Google/Facebook/Disney/Pixar...

StreamBright• 6 years ago

Depending on the use case. Some hyper scalers won't buy hardware just because of the CPU has the lower power consumption. It would be also not very wise to bet only on one vendor.

ItsTotallyOn2• 6 years ago

The fact that the Super 7 don't want to rely upon one vendor actually gives AMD a better shot - all other serious contenders use different instruction sets, so AMD's x86 procs are compatible with existing software ecosystems, thus reducing qualification and validation results. A viable x86 alternative to Intel has been sorely needed, and AMD fills that role quite nicely.

madengr2• 6 years ago

Some engineering software I use, uses Intel MPI libraries, and I suspect the math kernel also. The software runs 30% faster on an i7 versus a Ryzen 7, both with equivalent clock rate and number of cores.

Given the forthcoming i9 will hit 5.3 GHz, I’m choosing Intel for my next build. Until AMD comes out with libraries and compilers targeting scientific computing, Intel may still have the lead.

jrockway2• 6 years ago

Do Intel consumer chips support ECC memory now? Without ECC, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable doing any scientific computing or production serving. (I would consider using them for things like CI, though, because the price sure is good.)

herbstein• 6 years ago

The unfortunate truth about the Intel-compiled/supplied libraries is that they deliberately only use the SIMD codepaths on Intel chips. AMD chips are forced to fall back to SSE1.

fragmede• 6 years ago

AWS and GCP, at least, have started offering them, and at a discount, so I'd say yes.

https://www.amd.com/en/processors/amd-epyc-aws https://www.amd.com/en/processors/epyc-google-cloud

and

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/ https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/amd-epyc-proc...

scurvy11• 6 years ago

The AMD Ryzen platform holds so much promise. There's just one problem: all of their consumer chipset motherboards are terrible. Really, really flakey and bad. If you're used to slapping in name-brand memory to a board and booting it up, LOL good luck with AMD! Your options for current gen Ryzens are:

x570 -> Requires active cooling (fans) on the chipset because it throws off too much heat. The proprietray fan will die and your motherboard needs replacing. Congrats! Also, the PCIe lane configurations are weird (x8 x8 x8).

x470 -> Don't even look at your memory the wrong way if you want it to boot. Also, you need an older gen Ryzen/Athlon to update the BIOS to something that works with Ryzen 3000. Sure, there are stickers all over the box touting 'Ryzen 3000 compatibility!' but that's only after you update the BIOS. The BIOS the board ships with won't work at all.

b450 -> Dicier to run new stuff on such an older platform. The implementations are supposedly power weak for higher core count 3900/3950 CPUs.

AMD really dropped the ball on these chipset. They're the things that are leading to terrible user experiences and why folks end up going back to Intel after countless dollars wasted on shipping, RMAs, and swapping gear. No motherboard manufacturer actually designs anything. They just bundle chips together and change logos in the BIOS. Some might have a "flashback" button that works on half the boards, but there's little to differentiate one from the other.

If you want something that just works and is fast, stick with Intel because their chipsets are better. I'm writing this on a 3900x, too...

EDIT: Since many are doubting what I went through, let me list the permutations of boards, DIMMs, and CPUs.

CPUs: 3900x and 220GE DIMMs: Corsair Ballistix, G.Skill FlareX, Samsung ECC (unbuffered) Boards: x470 Taichi and Hero VII

I finally got my third Taichi to boot with a 220GE to the point that I could flash a BIOS to something "stable" for the 3900x.

I've literally built hundreds of servers and PCs in my lifetime (including AMD Romes). I know what I'm doing. This ecosystem just isn't mature yet!

na85• 6 years ago

Conversely, when I built a gaming rig last year I just slapped some Kingston memory, a Vega 64, and a Ryzen onto my x470 and everything Just Worked.

But then I'm not an overclocker and the only time I go into the BIOS is when something breaks and/or I need to change the boot order.

Maybe the quality control is what's at issue?

scurvy11• 6 years ago

QC could definitely be an issue. If you built yours last year, it was probably with a 2000-series Ryzen? Those were easier to work with given the gear at the time. The 3000-series and x470's are definitely a problem. Here's a clip of someone with a lot of time on his hands who says, "Oh yeah just let it boot loop for 7-10 minutes then it will finally work."[0] Honestly come on, that's not right. There's still something with what's in the inventory pipeline.

If you read the negative reviews, you'll see reports of "I RMA'd twice and only the third board worked." Not one or two and more than a few.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HstBneFf4g

neogodless2• 6 years ago

Is this a thing? I know it's anecdotal but three friends and I all built systems with X470 chipsets (some 2700X and one with a 3900X) and none of us had any issues whatsoever. This is the first I've heard of anything beyond the need for cooling for the X570.

Exmoor• 6 years ago

This is all pretty much FUD.

x570 -> Requires active cooling (fans) on the chipset because it throws off too much heat. The proprietray fan will die and your motherboard needs replacing.

AMD does require fans on the chipsets for X570 boards, but different board makers have treated this differently. My understanding is that some boards don't spin it up unless you're putting some serious PCIE 4.0 bandwidth in. Either way, "The fan will die and needs replacing" may be true someday (as it would be with any fan), but is not a guarantee.

x470 -> Don't even look at your memory the wrong way if you want it to boot. Also, you need an older gen Ryzen/Athlon to update the BIOS to something that works with Ryzen 3000. Sure, there are stickers all over the box touting 'Ryzen 3000 compatibility!' but that's only after you update the BIOS. The BIOS the board ships with won't work at all.

First gen Ryzen (1000 series chips) had some memory compatibility issues, but 2000 and 3000 chips haven't had many issues. It's true that you needed to do a BIOS upgrade on x470/B450 boards when 3000 series chips were released, but those stickers indicate that the board maker installed a newer BIOS and they should work out of the box. Unless you manage to find an X470 board that's been sitting on the shelf since before last July any x470 board you buy today is extremely likely to be compatible with all currently released Ryzen chips out of the box.

b450 -> Dicier to run new stuff on such an older platform. The implementations are supposedly power weak for higher core count 3900/3950 CPUs.

3000 series chips use a smaller process and are more power efficient per-core than 2000 and 1000 series chips, so you should have no issue running an 8 core chip in a B450 board. 12-core and 16-core chips might have some issues, but who buys a $79 motherboard and sticks a $500/$900 CPU in it?

scurvy11• 6 years ago

First gen Ryzen (1000 series chips) had some memory compatibility issues, but 2000 and 3000 chips haven't had many issues. It's true that you needed to do a BIOS upgrade on x470/B450 boards when 3000 series chips were released, but those stickers indicate that the board maker installed a newer BIOS and they should work out of the box. Unless you manage to find an X470 board that's been sitting on the shelf since before last July any x470 board you buy today is extremely likely to be compatible with all currently released Ryzen chips out of the box.<

I went through a pair of x470 Taichi's from Amazon last month. Both had non-compatible BIOS that wouldn't work with 3000-series. One so old that Dr Debug wouldn't even do anything. Just blank.

It's not just me. Read the negative product reviews of almost any x470 boards, and you'll see memory and non-POST issues very recently (followed by the response macro from mfg'er saying everything is fine just use 1 DIMM, etc). It's very much a crapshoot with AMD chipsets. You get a good one and everything's great. You get a few bad ones and you're stuck in swap/return/RMA hell.

Also, how can it be FUD when it's exactly what I went through?

Edit: The "Ryzen 3000 compatible" stickers do NOT mean it will work out of the box. It means that it CAN work...after you update the BIOS with an old CPU.

AMD will offer you a CPU "boot kit" to get it going, but you're risking on missing out on many 30 day return windows with shipping, covid19, processing, etc. Avoid it all and just get an Intel until the next refresh.

coredog64• 6 years ago

My Vive stopped working on my AMD machine, and it eventually required a bunch of BIOS and firmware updates to get it working again. On the upside, I had already made the updates to support the new Ryzen CPUs and so picked one up when they were on sale.

There’s probably a little more dodginess to the overall AMD ecosystem, but I expect that to be shaken out shortly (if it already hasn’t been)

sandworm101• 6 years ago

> Unless you manage to find an X470 board that's been sitting on the shelf since before last July

Happens every day. People are still buying boards like that off Amazon. All sale/clearance stock is likely still on the old bios.

jsgo• 6 years ago

Can't speak for anyone else, but I have a 570 board I think (MSI, I think, Phantom Gaming 4) with 2700x CPU. I have 4 sticks of 16GB ECC RAM (can't remember brand either, looked at the PG4's page where it lists compatible RAM) and they worked fine.

I don't know if the fact that I was looking at said recommended list is what negates the issue you're talking about, but I had minimal issues in my build (mine was from also including a PCIe to 8 SATA port card. Moved the main drive off of it, installed the drivers and started working fine). Initially tried to do a Windows VM w/ GeForce 1080 but scrapped it after driver issues with the device in VM (apparently, Nvidia doesn't want non-Quadra GPUs in VMs).

nitsky• 6 years ago

I have had an X570 with a 3900X for a few months. Everything has worked perfectly so far.

bitL• 6 years ago

Add in x399, so many problems I had with ASUS Zenith Extreme I didn't see since original Athlon days.

jchw• 6 years ago

For anyone wondering about anecdotes to the contrary, I slapped random DDR4 DIMMs into my x470 no problem whatsoever. I heard of issues with original Ryzen, but not 3000, and you’re probably best ignoring the FUD and just going for it.

(FWIW: I’ve built 2 Ryzen 2000 and 2 Ryzen 3000 boxes, all on x470 and B450. No RAM issues.)

2OEH8eoCRo02• 6 years ago

What are you on?

If you're used to slapping in name-brand memory to a board and booting it up[...]

Yeah, I am and that's exactly what I did with a new Ryzen CPU. How is this shit the top comment?

scurvy11• 6 years ago

Mobo makers are hiding behind their QVL rather than making a functioning product. "Sorry, we only tested this version of Crucial memory, not that version." Never mind the fact that they use the same in-house Crucial stuff underneath, changes are largely chip packaging, etc. Almost all of the memory on the market comes from one of the last 5 companies actually making DRAM (not counting Shenzen specials). Anything from Crucial, Samsung, Hynix, etc should work. It's JEDEC DDR4 compatible. Period. Hiding a bad product because a DIMM isn't on the QVL is low-class.

I'm not even talking about XMP stuff. I'm talking about booting with basic 2400/2666 stuff. "Yeah that's good RAM but not on our QVL. Get bent."

zrm3• 6 years ago

Since many are doubting what I went through

It's not that people are doubting your experience, it's that the Intel boards aren't any better. Many of the Intel boards also need a BIOS update to support later CPUs than they were originally released with, when they support them at all. DDR4 memory is finicky as heck. People end up having to RMA Intel boards all the time.

It's largely caused by the motherboard makers losing the ability to differentiate themselves. Half of what used to be on the motherboard is now integrated into modern CPUs and the other half is in the chipset which is now also made by the CPU manufacturer. Two motherboards with the same chipset are largely fungible so they have to compete on price and the quality suffers. It's a general problem and buying any consumer motherboard these days is kind of a crapshoot.

Here's a motherboard with 5 eggs and 50 reviews:

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813121180

It's a Pentium 4 motherboard from ~15 years ago. See if you can find a current generation Intel motherboard on there with 5 eggs from half that many reviews. I don't see any.

scurvy11• 6 years ago

I understand what you're saying about the P4 boards and that largely echos what I'm saying. The vendor chipsets are bad, AMD's are worse than Intel's, and there's not much a mobo vendor can do.

Intel boards do need upgrades to work with newer CPU's. This is true. But their updates actually work when they say they add support. Go back to July 2019 and read all the forum posts and YouTube videos of everyone complaining about Ryzen 3000, "Well Gigabyte said this release works...but it doesn't." And on and on.

It's a sorry state of affairs all around, but Intel is better than AMD. I write this on an AMD rig and after spending way too much money getting it going.

LargoLasskhyfv4• 6 years ago

Errm no. Onboard voltage regulation is very important and can be implemented very different.

rasz2• 6 years ago

chipsets arent even electrically connected to memory in modern computers, so umm?

LargoLasskhyfv4• 6 years ago

I'm with you in parts. But for someone who built so many systems, the fan thing should be a non-issue. Just get a mechanically fitting replacement from somewhere, be it aliexpress, or some industrial supplier who serves end-users. The proprietary fans aren't magical pixie dust. Should be 5 to 15$ a piece, depending on the quality. Just don't source them from the usual PC-places. THOSE are ghettos, caring and catering about nothing else but shiny LED bling bling g

(The same applies to laptops, so far i've never came across one which hadn't a label or engraving that told me all i need to know for choosing the right replacement.)

willtim• 6 years ago

Is AMD now a better choice for Linux, especially given the ongoing stability problems with Intel's Linux graphics drivers?

Glyptodon• 6 years ago

When everything lines up AMD integrated graphics are very very pleasant on Linux. But you will also find random Kernel versions with obnoxious regressions and bugs you have to hunt down and fix or work around.

jatone5• 6 years ago

those are rare, and almost non-existant in LTS kernels.

m-p-32• 6 years ago

The drivers are quite good on newer kernel versions, it's been mostly pain-free for me

mindfulplay• 6 years ago

I am a little out of date on this topic but what effect does Spectre/Meltdown and other mitigations have on newer processors? Is it fundamentally just a software fix going forward? Seems like we are willing to sacrifice in the order of 10% performance at least in the previous generations....

pstrateman• 6 years ago

For many workloads the effect was significantly more than 10%.

I had to disable mitigations to complete a filesystem checksum, it was on the order of 1000x slower.

cptskippy3• 6 years ago

I really hate these articles, they're click bait intended to sow discourse among fanbois and drive traffic to the site. People who have recently built systems read them and either feel validation or regret. That just spawns comments from people either trying to justify their loser choice or flaunt their lucky choice of the winner. The loyalists crawl out of wood work to make comments like "I still prefer x because y". These articles draw broad conclusions and influence perception across the board, even if they mention performance tiers, that brand X is always superior to brand Y.

I've been building systems for almost 30 years and in that time Intel has mostly been the performance champion AND has always screwed you over on price. Sometimes they lead by a lot, sometimes by very little or not at all but their platform is always more expensive.

Both Intel and AMD introduce a brand (e.g. Pentium, Ahtlon) as their new flagship and then overtime erode the brand each year with lower spec products. Eventually they stop introducing higher spec products altogether and the brand sinks to the bottom of their product lineup as a new brand takes the top ranks (e.g. i9, Ryzen).

Depending on when you get into building PCs you might have brand loyalty because maybe your first system was a Celeron you unlocked and ran at PIII speeds. Or maybe you picked up a first gen Althon that was the performance king for a few quarters, or the Athlon II when Intel was floundering with Netburst. Maybe you started out with Core and in your view Intel has always dominated AMD. Regardless your perceptions are skewed.

Identify your workload and your budget, buy the best thing that meets your needs regardless of brand. Intel is historically more stable and less problematic. AMD usually offers significantly more performance per $ on the low end. Then again that all takes too much effort, just buy whatever makes you feel good about yourself on the internet according to these click bait articles.

neogodless2• 6 years ago

Certainly if you think about it in terms of us vs. them, black and white, I don't see value.

If you're making purchasing decisions, you should be looking mostly at your specific needs, and the big picture around what you need and how to get good value for your money. If you can afford it, vote your conscious as well, and for a healthy future.

I've owned Cyrux, Pentium, Athlon, Core Duo, Phenom, Core i# and Ryzen. I'm partial to AMD as an underdog, and having a personality that always rooted for them. I'm unimpressed with Intel lately, but up until this year I still wouldn't buy an AMD laptop (though I've recommended a few for friends and family if the need and budget fit).

This article does try to paint "one answer for all questions" and of course that's silly. For most consumers I think they'll be better off this year with choosing Ryzen. But the Ryzen laptop chips that are impressing everyone seem to be in short supply. So I can't cheer them on just yet. I don't purchase for datacenters or professional rendering so I wouldn't dare weigh in there.

To sum up, focus on your needs, and individual options, not brand names!

partingshots2• 6 years ago

You’re a bit out of date here.

AMD has largely taken the performance crown thanks to their Zen CPU platform and move to using TSMC for their process as Intel has lagged behind, with major problems deriving from their inability to get 10nm working.

If it helps to give you some perspective on how such a drastic change could occur, Intel’s 10nm process was originally meant to be ready for release in 2014!, and yet they still haven’t managed to scale out production after six years of debugging and failure.

It’s a combination of AMD simultaneously doing extremely well and Intel severely stagnating that has allowed this to happen.

cptskippy3• 6 years ago

You’re a bit out of date here.

I have no idea what you're talking about with your vague remark AND I think your attempt at pedantry has only helped to solidify the point I was making.

AMD vs. Intel 2020: Who Makes the Best CPUs?

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